Congratulations to our 2008 Dean's Prize winners!

Congratulations to Morgan Berman (Women's Studies, '08) and
Caroline Carpenter Nichols (PhD candidate, American Studies), who
received the 2008 Dean's Prize for Student Scholarship on Women.

The Dean’s Prize for Student Scholarship on Women, generously
funded by the Dean’s Office, recognizes an outstanding paper by a
student at the College on a subject related to women or gender. We had
a record number of submissions this year and it was an extremely
difficult decision. Thanks to the Women’s Studies Prizes Committee for
all their hard work!

Morgan Berman (Women's Studies, '08) won in the undergraduate
category, for her paper (based on her Honors thesis) “Beyond Pro Versus
Anti: A Transnational Feminist Critique of Cross-Cultural Comparisons
of Female Genital Cutting.” Morgan identifies a deadlock in feminist
accounts of FGC, showing how the debate has been reduced to two,
opposing positions: “either supporting local communities to practice
FGC as they see fit or rejecting FGC as an intolerable practice.” In
her paper, she argues that “Western feminist scholarship needs to take
responsibility for its own biases and then confront them in order to
support the work of local activist groups who are personally involved
in the process of change enacted by activists working in these
communities.”

The winning entry in the graduate student category was a paper by
Caroline Carpenter Nichols’ (PhD candidate, American Studies).
Caroline's submission was a revised chapter from her PhD dissertation
in American Studies, and the title is “The ‘Adventuress’ Becomes a
‘Lady’: Ida B. Wells’ British Tours.” The chapter describes the effects
on Wells’ anti-lynching campaign of the lecture tours that she took
through England and Scotland in 1893. Drawing on Wells’ own
autobiography and diaries, Caroline argues that the tours and the new
outbreak of “spectacle lynchings” in the American South “spurred Wells
to reconceptualize her campaign,” to “assume new leadership roles” and
to become more aggressive, even more masculine, in her
self-presentation.